Last week I posted about Faith Perspectives in Our World. I shared some data from two particular sources, one being Daniel Groody’s Globalization, Spirituality & Justice (3rd edition from 2015). It considers stats from the perspective of reducing the world to a village of 100 people. Continue reading
According to Douglas Jacobsen in his The World’s Christians, this is the percentage breakdown of Christians in the world in 1800, 1900 and 2000. Continue reading
These days I think a lot about spiritual formation. Many people do, since it has become kind of in vogue.
In Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eugene Peterson defines this as “primarily what the Spirit does, forming the resurrection life of Christ in us.” This work has already begun in Christ (i.e., Eph 2:4-7), but we are called ever more into this resurrection life in Christ by the Spirit.
Spiritual formation = formed by the Spirit.
I’m convinced the healthiest way to move toward spiritual formation is first of all heeding the call to slow down.
It’s nearly impossible to do this in our world. Everything—including the church—is about moving faster, doing more, doing bigger and better. Even if we do not hear those exact words, we feel the narrative that our culture is telling us. It seeps out of every nook and cranny.
It is all exhausting. We know it. We’ve been there.
We know it full well. Continue reading
This week I began reading a book I may have never come across if it weren’t for my PhD supervisor. It’s a book entitled Saving Face, which our cohort will be discussing together over the next few months.
This is the the thrust of the book, taken from the Amazon abstract:
Faces are all around us and fundamentally shape both everyday experience and our understanding of people. To lose face is to be alienated and experience shame, to be enfaced is to enjoy the fullness of life. . . This pioneering book explores the nature of face and enfacement, both human and divine. Pattison discusses questions concerning what face is, how important face is in human life and relationships, and how we might understand face, both as a physical phenomenon and as a series of socially-inflected symbols and metaphors about the self and the body.
The BTTB group was finally back together at the table discussing important things about the Bible. Continue reading
